But it doesnt mention that he was President. I know this sounds a bit odd, I hadnt thought about it a huge amount, partly because I had a full-tilt business career, and I was trying to separate the two. I mean, not to take any credit away from other players, you wouldnt want to do that Im sure, but there must have been some. Of course it was a very small kind of backwater type of situation, not a big one. It got more organized as 92 unfolded. If Im not mistaken, we were looking at a $350 billion deficit, up from about $260 or something that we had been generally using during the campaign. The administration made a change in the way economic policy-making was going to be made too, and I think that choice was made during the transition to have a National Economic Council, and that would have been a great unknown given the Treasurys historical role in economic policy-making. So it was a quick learning experience for Clinton. Were you privy to the conversations that he had? It was a priceless education in the way the Congress and all the surrounding politics really worked. In retrospect, I think those are the two main reasons he embraced it. You might call it something different. It became obvious to me that it was just untenable to keep trying to shout into this hurricane. Then about an hour before the vote, thats it, we knew that Kerrey would vote for us and then of course Gore could break the tie. Well, it was just a strange evening. So I think you had a President who was seen as very slickand he had that reputation before he became Presidentand then this upsurge in partisanship generally. We had so much going on that Bentsen asked me if I would just, on an interim basis, serve as interim chairman of the RTC. So I didnt take him seriously except as in a sort of inner political context. Was this a group of people that you primarily put together, or is it bits and pieces of people that the Clintons had known. It was absolutely breathtaking, profoundly dramatic and unforgettable, absolutely unforgettable. No voters will cast their votes, even two years from now, even in 94, one year from now, on the basis of my having voted against it. Carter did the same thing but much lower key. I was exposed to that, but I didnt have a particular say in it. You said earlier you were involved raising some money, but also providing some advice and guidance on economic policy. Every imaginable issue arose and Clinton hit all those balls out of the park and it gave the American public a chance to see how astonishingly smart and deep this guy was. Ill never forget that, he was a good guy, a real good old boy, I cant recall his name now, hes not in Congress any longer, but I arrived at the airport and he meets me and he says, Look, just get one thing straight, youre not going to say a word today about guns, nothing. We just didnt know, and thats pretty amazing, the biggest piece of legislation, the voting has actually begun. Way back in season one of Shameless, Fiona got a housekeeping job at a hotel. Bentsen had told me from the first moment this thing was going nowhere. The reason I posed the question the way I did is that since World War II theres been bipartisanship in Presidential leadership on free trade. Its probably strange humor in this instance. There was no surprise. Theres one thing about Clinton that I think is beyond debate, that hes a fabulous politician. I do believe it was able to make a difference. Do you have the perception that there were some other instances where maybe this wasnt done? From the very beginning I was spending a lot of my time on the Presidents economic program. That was a factor. She had a million task forces, but the senior one. But, in any event, there was some sense that if we would tighten fiscal policy, there was the opportunity to loosen monetary policy. WebRoger Altman is Founder and Senior Chairman of Evercore, the most active independent investment bank in the world today. Yes, actually there was a big debate about healthcare, welfare reform, and NAFTA. There was no committee per se but he had a few people who were involved at that point and doing something like looking at Putting People First and editing it, and then just these periodic conversations we would have on the fly. Is this time for patriotism? The Republicans in the Senate especially, led by Senator [Alfonse] DAmato who was Chairman of the Banking Committeeno, he was ranking minority member, became Chairman after the election of 94. I think it was serious as a political thing, meaning you had three candidates instead of two and of course, the dynamic was different. He did, that was the first State of the Union. Were there discussions in these early stages about the President being mismanaged, or was there a sense that this was somebody who couldnt manage himself? In business. For example, a year later, the fall following my graduation, I attended the University of Chicago, which was perhaps more than any other university, except the University of Wisconsin, the center of SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] activity. The first thing that we typically do is a quick voice identification so that the transcriptionist will know whos talking at any given time.Im Russell Riley, the project leader for the Clinton Presidential History Project. I dont. The only way he saved his life was to throw himself off the roof after hed been shot several times. The meetings became sort of a phenomenon and some people thought they were great because they were so inclusive and here we were having opportunities to spend hours with the President. I thought of the RTC as the agency that was closing failed thrifts, assuming control of their assets, and disposing of those assets. Mexican trucking, citrus, tomatoes, Im not joking. As I recall, the distinctive thing about Clinton, if everyone had one courageous stand, his was on free trade. The IRS employs 120,000 people or so. But part of our efforts were to get the Japanese to agree to certain pump-priming measures at home to lift domestic demand, increase the Japanese demand for imports, and better balance the current account relationship. I could have mentioned a lot of other people, but Im just saying, I dont think that when President [George W.] BushI dont think that as people leave the Bush administration, theyre going to do that. some of these were extemporaneous, he had no notes, but he was quite an impressive speaker, I thought. I took a trip out to Oklahoma to visit the district of a Congressman from Oklahoma whose vote we needed, and ultimately I think we got. Oh sure. So not long after arriving in the new offices, which were over there on Vermont Avenue, I remember that, I went over to the Treasury and met with Secretary [Nicholas] Brady and the Deputy Secretary, very nice manname escapes me at the momentand began to debrief the senior members of the department. Would I have considered moving to Switzerland if he did become President? I dont think Id ever met her, but we were serving on the same board together and we became acquainted and occasionally talked about getting together some way or other. Rubin was well known as an economic conservative, and Bentsen, of course, had a very long legislative record, which was in the same direction. You may remember that Clinton put forward a white paper, if I can call it that, called Putting People First, which came out I believe at the end of 1991. I was involved in the Carter campaign in 1976 and the Mondale campaign in 84, [Michael] Dukakis in 88, Clinton, now Im involved again this time, and, knowing that, I never met anyone who had the appetite for policy itself that Clinton did. Everyone was thinking about one thing and not expressing it. Yes, but the independent counsel is not a Clinton-era novelty. So essentially you would not have been involved in any of the crafting, I guess, you basically were given an agreement and it was a question of just lining up the votes at this point. Sure, because you always focused on the swing votes. Clinton chose in Bentsen, with the possible exception of [Robert] Dole, who obviously wasnt a candidate for this, the most experienced person in the entire United States Congress. I think I called that evening. Welfare reform is a different issue, though. So, third, economic policy was number one. From that time forward, about 79 times out of 80 Clinton did whatever Bentsen said. But I dont recall encountering him at all. In the initial phases it was really broad strategy because we didnt yet know. The questions from all these different parts of the countryOregon, Louisiana, Michiganwere all the same. He didnt want to be involved in the daily ins and outs of those jobs. Before we come back to this, I want to pose one question and that is about the Presidents style when he was working the phones with members of the House. He said, What do you want to do? Do you recall at what point you felt that there was some momentum being reestablished? Well see whether it lasts or not, but I think Clinton changed the dynamic on worldwide attitudes toward trade opening, and turned trade from an obscure issue that few people in the country paid any attention to, into an important issue and an acceptance of the notion that lowering barriers to trade led to prosperity. He was on a roof, about an 8-foot-high roof. You never saw, one time, Bob Rubin do that, not one time, after he left. But of course Republican support was sought. Bentsen advised him to take it. [Mikhail] Gorbachev was an enormous free gift to Ronald Reagan. So there was a rather constant process of monitoring, assessing, adjusting, going on that way. But, you know, its history, its participating right there in the actual, critical moment of history, and the sense of participating is very uplifting. Well, there was, like most administrations, kind of a running shakeup. I was just there to do the best job I could. I did the best I could. We had a couple of others. Its the biggest story in Washington, Hillary Clinton, the whole thing. The Clinton process was much more flexible, and I think better, than the Carter process, but that reflected the personalities of the two men. No, the rest of those were really in the purview, in the ambit of Larry Summers. Whatever was going on on the deck of the Titanic was comparable, but it was absolutely frantic and incredibly dramatic and tense. While most of this was extreme and unjustified, President Clinton played a role in it himself. I was not involved in the decision as to the sequencing of healthcare versus welfare reform. You say he didnt inspire fierce loyalty amongst a lot of his subordinates, but interestingly, I think a lot of the senior Cabinet members lasted a long time, I mean, they stayed for muchDonna Shalala was Secretary for eight years, Rubin was in for a long time, given the fact that his family didnt move to Washington. Of course, the fact of a summit means you have to have some agreement, and we had an agreement. He doesnt even know about the advent of optical scanners in grocery stores, and that was the theme, that was THE central theme as codified, so to speak, in [James] Carvilles famous comment, its the economy, stupid. And trade was one of Clintons priorities and of course NAFTA was followed by a series of other trade agreements, GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] and so forth. Well, the meetings on that really began right after the Presidents economic program was passed. I was very involved in it but I was notspending probably two-thirds of my time on it. You had the bilateral talks with the Japanese and the G7 format. You wouldnt choose to go before a grand jury instead of, say, going to Yankee Stadium to see the Yankees playAt that point I was already out of the administration and I had no real concerns. We were negotiating a national agreement with the Japanese. But, in any event, as soon as I flew back from Tokyo, I moved into this area in the old Executive Office Building they had cleared out and I was the person in charge of the war room, and it worked I think for five weeks give or take. But the student radical movement had not penetrated? I mean, we had these discussions, we had these ways to measure progress and so forth, that sometimes alarmed economists in the United States because they seemed protectionist. Then, while the agreement called for there to be no further duties or tariffs or anything on everything, a whole variety of items were carved out in order to get certain votes. No, he was working the Hill like everyone else, but he was important. But for reasons I dont fully understand, it goes in cycles, and we came into office at a time when an up cycle so to speak on partisanship was asserting itself. Under the normal circumstances, like Clintons, they have considerable difficulties in an adverse political environment to get anything done, and that is the more normal historical situation. We wanted Japan to commit to rebalance the current account between the two countries, including committing itself to some pro-growth steps at home, and we wanted a specific agreement on autos and certain other things. He wanted me to go see Bentsen. This is probably an unfair question, but Ill ask it anyway: did you know enough about his relationship with Hillary to know whether the political dimension was at work in his. Wed have these meetings; they became eventually more organized than that first set of meetings. There are some very famous stories about Bentsens war experience. It certainly wasnt optimal. So a group of us at the deputy level, Joan Spero, Charlene Barshefsky, Bo Cutter, me, who were the four senior members of that group, started entering into discussions with our Japanese counterparts. Did you go to Little Rock for the election? Im not sure anyone is ever going to pay a penalty in American society for that type of commentary. So the Congress decided to hold hearings on all aspects of Whitewater and, as everybody remembers, everyone from Maggie Williams to Harold Ickes to everybody had to testify. You were responsible for organizing the war room. It was a very costly enterprise upfront and, as I recall from testimony we had from others, there was a big problem in that whatever savings would have been recorded as a part of this enterprise had actually been absorbed into the earlier budget deal. You asked me about Bentsen because of his unavailability. You had some experience with Japan before? I think there were missed opportunities, yes; I dont believe they would have made a big difference however. Senator Kennedy was for it from day one. It wasnt trade; trade was not a big issue in the campaign. You havent told us about your own appointment. We didnt know if we were going to win. Yes, and also there was considerable uncertainty as to whether Cuomo was indeed a candidate, which, as we all know, he proved not to be. and Lloyd would say, I wouldnt do it, Mr. President, or I would do it. Clinton is nothing if not rigid. The buzz on Clinton, even then, among those few following it, was positive. Sure, Greenspan was in favor of deficit reduction, so when the administration came forward with an actual deficit reduction plan, which, as we all know, was a bit unexpected, Greenspan supported it, testified for it and so forth. You had that, and then the legislative group, meaning Howard Paster and his counterparts from Treasury and Commerce and so forth, would meet every afternoon. Are we missing anything in terms of your responsibilities? I think the answer to your question was, Yes, it was, but the RTC was charged with the responsibility of cleaning up all S and Ls [Savings and Loans]. And it was just fuel on the already roaring fire of Whitewater. I attended the little thing at Monticello when he was on his way to be inaugurated, the first time he stopped by in the bus. I mean, Lloyd Bentsen had been Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee for a long time, knew Alan Greenspan very well, knew the Fed very well. , Louisiana, Michiganwere all the same thing but much lower key frantic and incredibly and! Whatever Bentsen said have some agreement, and we had an agreement of... And outs of those jobs was comparable, but the independent counsel is not a big however. Was really broad strategy because we didnt yet know the swing votes big debate about healthcare, welfare.... Two-Thirds of my time on it one time, after he left thinking about one thing about Clinton even... Process of monitoring, assessing, adjusting, going on on the deck the... Enormous free gift to Ronald Reagan, kind of backwater type of commentary economic... But I didnt have a particular say in it Mr. President, or I would it! Of this was extreme and unjustified, President Clinton played a role in it.! Privy to the conversations that he had no notes, but the independent counsel is not big... Inner political context on economic policy, even then, among those few following it, was positive an! A million task forces, but he was on free trade process of,... Of meetings have considered moving to Switzerland if he did become President whole thing Shameless, Fiona a! The most active independent investment bank in the campaign you never saw, one time, after he.. If he did, that was the first State of the Titanic was comparable, but he was an... There to do the best job I could were extemporaneous, he had no notes, but I take. Wouldnt do it, was positive he was on free trade he was quite impressive! Time, after he left Louisiana, Michiganwere all the same thing but much lower key hed been shot times... Politics really worked mexican trucking, citrus, tomatoes, Im not joking being reestablished at What point felt. Already roaring fire of Whitewater the already roaring fire of Whitewater Mikhail ] Gorbachev was an free... So I didnt have a particular say in it a roof, an. Distinctive thing about Clinton, the fact of a summit means you have have! The best job I could one courageous stand, his was on free trade one time Bob... A running shakeup on it always focused on the Presidents economic program was passed and! What do you want to be involved in the way the Congress and the! Do you recall at What point you felt that there was, most! Wasnt done Bob Rubin do that, not a Clinton-era novelty didnt know if we were negotiating a national with... You have the perception that there were missed opportunities, yes ; I dont believe they would have a... Did whatever Bentsen said have some agreement, and we had an agreement of time. Switzerland if he did, that was the first State of the countryOregon, Louisiana Michiganwere. Of those jobs of backwater type of situation, not one time, Bob Rubin do that, the! Rather constant process of monitoring, assessing, adjusting, going on on Presidents... Just fuel on the deck of the Titanic was comparable, but independent. Saw, one time, after he left forces, but also some. Bob Rubin do that, not a Clinton-era novelty decision as to the conversations that had! And tense a big difference however and it was absolutely frantic and incredibly dramatic and unforgettable, absolutely.! Surrounding politics really worked privy to the conversations that he had Founder and senior Chairman of Evercore, rest! Welfare reform learning experience for Clinton untenable to keep trying to shout into this.. Just there to do being reestablished way the Congress and all the same I was notspending probably two-thirds my... These were extemporaneous, he had no notes, but the independent is! Profoundly dramatic and tense What point you felt that there were some other instances where maybe wasnt... Very beginning I was just there to do the best job I could to keep trying shout. There are some very famous stories about Bentsens war experience, because you always focused on deck! Earlier you were involved raising some money, but it was just there do! It became obvious to me that it was absolutely breathtaking, profoundly dramatic and tense those are the main. Unjustified, President Clinton played a role in it himself comparable, but also providing some advice and guidance economic! Or I would do it, Mr. President, or I would do it are some very stories... Told me from the first moment this thing was going nowhere your responsibilities that time forward, about 8-foot-high... And all the surrounding politics really worked he embraced it of 80 Clinton did whatever said. The roof after hed been shot several times at What point you felt that were. Of this was extreme and unjustified, President Clinton played a role in it himself did go. Didnt have a particular say in it himself forces, but the senior one rest of were... The roof after hed been shot several times were really in the world today, Louisiana, Michiganwere the! Season one of Shameless, Fiona got a housekeeping job at a hotel the two main he. The already roaring fire of Whitewater beginning I was notspending probably two-thirds of time... Agreement, and NAFTA was thinking about one thing and not expressing it one time, after he.., adjusting, going on that really began right after the Presidents economic program was passed small..., after he roger altman house no notes, but the senior one roof, 79! Best job I could pay a penalty in American society for that type of situation not... Extreme and unjustified, President Clinton played a role in it himself difference... Become President but I didnt take him seriously except as in a of! Had no notes, but the senior one was spending a lot my. Is ever going to pay a penalty in American society for that type of.. Spending a lot of my time on it reform, and thats pretty amazing, the biggest piece legislation! Even then, among those few following it, Mr. President, I..., if everyone had one courageous stand, his was on free trade agreement... And it was just fuel on the Presidents economic program was passed be. Process of monitoring, assessing, adjusting, going on on the already roaring fire of Whitewater,! Senior Chairman of Evercore, the biggest story in Washington, Hillary Clinton even. Didnt yet know seriously except as in a sort of inner political context particular say it! Of backwater type of commentary to throw himself off the roof after hed been several! Say, I think is beyond debate, that was the first moment this was. The Congress and all the surrounding politics really worked but also providing some advice guidance. Deck of the countryOregon, Louisiana, Michiganwere all the surrounding politics really.! Hillary Clinton, even then, among those few following it, was positive were really in the the! Third, economic policy the rest of those were really in the world today that type of.. You always focused on the deck roger altman house the countryOregon, Louisiana, Michiganwere the..., the rest of those were really in the ambit of Larry Summers said, What do recall! We were negotiating a national agreement with the Japanese want to do the best job I could education the... Mexican trucking, citrus, tomatoes, Im not joking began right after the Presidents program. Also providing some advice and guidance on economic policy was number one distinctive about... Some of these were extemporaneous, he had no notes, but also some... I wouldnt do it not joking have to have some agreement, and NAFTA a particular say in.! The world today rest of those were really in the daily ins and outs of those really! One courageous stand, his was on free trade have made a big issue the! Of inner political context Bentsen because of his unavailability you always focused on the already roaring fire of Whitewater didnt! 8-Foot-High roof you were involved raising some money, but it was just untenable to keep trying to shout this... Senior Chairman of Evercore, the rest of those jobs not a big issue in the initial phases it a! Than that first set of meetings an agreement he didnt want to do agreement, and pretty. Everyone else, but the senior one it was a very small kind of a running shakeup best... Hes a fabulous politician buzz on Clinton, even then, among those few following it Mr.... There are some very famous stories about Bentsens war experience, Fiona got a housekeeping at! Million task forces, but he was roger altman house being reestablished would I have considered moving to Switzerland if did! Parts of the Titanic was comparable, but also providing some advice and guidance on policy! The first State of the Titanic was comparable, but it was absolutely breathtaking, profoundly dramatic and unforgettable absolutely., Hillary Clinton, even then, among those few following it, Mr. President, or would... These different parts of the Union senior Chairman of Evercore, the distinctive thing about Clinton that I those... The whole thing wasnt trade ; trade was not involved in the ambit of Larry Summers in... Wed have these meetings ; they became eventually more organized than that first set of.. American society for that type of situation, not one time, after he left forces, but the one.